Unique ideas and money on the internet
Over the past few days I been reading about people who have hit the jackpot through sheer uniqueness in their ideas and some well executed marketing and promotional strategies which in itself is unique. Alex who owns the milliondollarhomepage.com, after hitting the million dollar mark is "already up to something new. Something that could be REALLY big" according to his blog. By now almost everybody know abt the milliondollarpage which started with the somewhat crazy yet convincing idea of having a million pixels on the page being sold for $1/pixel placing ads. The crazy yet unique idea caught like wild fire and coupled with some great marketing strategies where he even employed a PR person in the US once he hit the $4,00,000 mark paid him rich dividends. According to him employing the Imal Wagner as his PR person was one of the best moves he ever made. Some unique ideas well executed was the secret behind his success.
He will be releasing a e-book soon to reveal his secrets behind the success. Alex is only 21 now and is already a marketing genius. I can't wait to see what his next project is gonna be even if he has not revealed anything yet.
The site was even knocked down with a DOS(denial of service) attack before the last 1000 pixels was bought by milliondollarweightloss.com's owner at an e-bay auction for $38,100. The only thing the DOS attack did was to get him more press coverage. So ummm crime pays? Yeah i guess in this case it paid the owner of the site well by giving him some free press coverage. And to whoever did that attack I have only one thing to say...focus that energy on creativity and uniqueness.
A lot of pixel-copy cat sites has sprung up trying to emulate his success but if you are not unique and don't have something to sell for urself people are not gonna sit back and take notice. In Alex's own words "no other individual will become rich from a Million Dollar Homepage copycat site. Do something different!"
And talking about doing something different..how can I not include Eric Bauman the dude who has made millions by posting other people's homemade grossout videos to his Web site. It is said that he has not spent a single money on direct advertising and yet he gets an estimated 1.2 million hits a day. According to wired.com's article about him he even has a pact to bring ebaum's content to cell phones. His annual ad revenue over 2005 was $10 million. Talk about the potential about earning revenue just through ads and this one shows how great a potential it is. But it is not been all easy for Eric.
The dude who posts all that funny and gross videos to his site is not always laughing coz he is getting even death threats apart from his site being attacked and his office vandalized. According to wired's article Kevin Flynn and animator is thinking about slapping him with a class action suit for "ripping off his viral ditty". I mean it is not easy to be funny all the time when people say that "Bauman built his empire on stolen goods – snatching obscure media from around the Web, erasing or denying credits, slapping on the eBaum watermark, then selling millions of dollars' worth of ads around the purloined content." But now if someone wants to upload content all submissions must be made through an upload form, which includes a thorough consent-and-release agreement requiring authors to relinquish all rights to their material. In exchange, eBaum's World has begun paying for content.
From what i read, Eric Bauman always had a different take on things even before he started ebaum's and filled it with clips he had gone on to put a bid on a non existent sports car his site through ebay and it helped to mutually promote e-bay and his site. By the way his girl friend is the content manager for the site. Yeah so while we sit in front of the monitor and laugh at the videos he is laughing his way to the bank all coz he started thinking differently and he is only 26.
Basically when you look at it the money is for the idea. These are just plain simple ideas that are just unique but the person had the conviction that it is gonna work and stuck on it like superglue and just went on executing it well. How can one forget David Miles Jr. and Kato Leonard, two 20-year-olds in Louisville who started freeweblayouts.net with the idea of giving free weblayouts to the millions of myspace.com's users. I am sure when they started it they must not have even imagined opening a bank a/c but thanks to google's adsense their dream has become their life style now. According to USAtoay.com's article "Google and Yahoo dominate the booming online search advertising business, which is expected to grow to $5.6 billion in 2008, from $2.7 billion in 2004. Profit from search advertising enabled Google to more than double its revenue in 2004, to $3.1 billion." The owners of the freeweblayouts site are supposedly making $100,000 a month.That is what I have been reading.
Marcus Finch of plentyofish.com had an altogether different idea when it came to making money out of the internet. To bring in the millions of souls looking for the better half together..all for free. And most of his revenues come from adsense. He runs it with his wife from his home. And what he makes? A cool $300,000 per month. And he manages to serve 20 million dynamic page views a day on plentyoffish using a single web server and 1 database server. This guy not only knows how to make money by bringing people together but he knows his computers too. He talks about it in his blog.
The owners of the hotornot.com site makes $15,000 a day! I mean a picture rating site making that much money is awesome. Talk about building popularity. All they had to do was drive it by the internet readers who provided all their resources..the pics and the rating. They thought about it and the idea stuck. Wait! the list is not over. Netguru's Matther Daimler is another person that I really appreciate for turning his simple idea of giving the flyers a smooth journey into a website that earns him $10,000 to $20,000 a month. And that is just the money he earns through adsense.
When Matther Daimler, 28, used to be just a traveler he used to look at the better situated traveler and think "He has more legroom. I want that seat next time." From there it just turned into an obsession to find a better seat and to a website where he started to rope in like minded travelers who can get an idea about what seat positions are available and get it through his website. He has now 21 airlines in his website and it has become the gathering place for all those long legged and comfy addicted travelers. His site is now not only about getting the best seat but also about getting the best amenities.
And by owning blogs Jason makes more than a million dollar a year just through adsense. He owns the weblogsinc.com site. You can read an interview with Jason here which would give you some insight into how he went with it.
I mean these are people whose ideas have metamorphosized into million dollar bank accounts and when you think about that you can't stop to think about the guys behind youtube.com Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, whose idea of having a place for people to upload and share their videos with a change using flash players online lead to a $1.5 billion purchase by google and when you realise that the site started operating only in feb 2005 and google bought it for that amount when the site was just over a year old it is just amazing. And how can one forget Tom Anderson who founded myspace.com. An idea of having a social networking site resulting in a purchase for $580 million by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation in July 2005. It is amazing to think that the original myspace.com domain was owned by some other company that provided online storage and file sharing for customers but collapsed due to the slow speed and lack of revenue.
On the other spectrum of the internet there are a group of people making a life through their creativeness and passion to write. Yes blogging is yet another aspect and I will be touching on that in the coming days.
By the way if you need more info on adsense and the related stuffs and how you can wisely use it to bring in some money i suggest you go to Darren't Rowse's blog site problogger where he generously gives you a lot of tips.
There are other bloggers too whom I find useful and I will be talking about them in a later article.
Most of the great marketeers and businessman are made on the streets not on the business schools. But yes if you have the talent the business schools can horn it. But it is the innate passion that distinguishes people. So follow your passion. It's all about the unique creative ideas, passion and executing it well.
He will be releasing a e-book soon to reveal his secrets behind the success. Alex is only 21 now and is already a marketing genius. I can't wait to see what his next project is gonna be even if he has not revealed anything yet.
The site was even knocked down with a DOS(denial of service) attack before the last 1000 pixels was bought by milliondollarweightloss.com's owner at an e-bay auction for $38,100. The only thing the DOS attack did was to get him more press coverage. So ummm crime pays? Yeah i guess in this case it paid the owner of the site well by giving him some free press coverage. And to whoever did that attack I have only one thing to say...focus that energy on creativity and uniqueness.
A lot of pixel-copy cat sites has sprung up trying to emulate his success but if you are not unique and don't have something to sell for urself people are not gonna sit back and take notice. In Alex's own words "no other individual will become rich from a Million Dollar Homepage copycat site. Do something different!"
And talking about doing something different..how can I not include Eric Bauman the dude who has made millions by posting other people's homemade grossout videos to his Web site. It is said that he has not spent a single money on direct advertising and yet he gets an estimated 1.2 million hits a day. According to wired.com's article about him he even has a pact to bring ebaum's content to cell phones. His annual ad revenue over 2005 was $10 million. Talk about the potential about earning revenue just through ads and this one shows how great a potential it is. But it is not been all easy for Eric.
The dude who posts all that funny and gross videos to his site is not always laughing coz he is getting even death threats apart from his site being attacked and his office vandalized. According to wired's article Kevin Flynn and animator is thinking about slapping him with a class action suit for "ripping off his viral ditty". I mean it is not easy to be funny all the time when people say that "Bauman built his empire on stolen goods – snatching obscure media from around the Web, erasing or denying credits, slapping on the eBaum watermark, then selling millions of dollars' worth of ads around the purloined content." But now if someone wants to upload content all submissions must be made through an upload form, which includes a thorough consent-and-release agreement requiring authors to relinquish all rights to their material. In exchange, eBaum's World has begun paying for content.
From what i read, Eric Bauman always had a different take on things even before he started ebaum's and filled it with clips he had gone on to put a bid on a non existent sports car his site through ebay and it helped to mutually promote e-bay and his site. By the way his girl friend is the content manager for the site. Yeah so while we sit in front of the monitor and laugh at the videos he is laughing his way to the bank all coz he started thinking differently and he is only 26.
Basically when you look at it the money is for the idea. These are just plain simple ideas that are just unique but the person had the conviction that it is gonna work and stuck on it like superglue and just went on executing it well. How can one forget David Miles Jr. and Kato Leonard, two 20-year-olds in Louisville who started freeweblayouts.net with the idea of giving free weblayouts to the millions of myspace.com's users. I am sure when they started it they must not have even imagined opening a bank a/c but thanks to google's adsense their dream has become their life style now. According to USAtoay.com's article "Google and Yahoo dominate the booming online search advertising business, which is expected to grow to $5.6 billion in 2008, from $2.7 billion in 2004. Profit from search advertising enabled Google to more than double its revenue in 2004, to $3.1 billion." The owners of the freeweblayouts site are supposedly making $100,000 a month.That is what I have been reading.
Marcus Finch of plentyofish.com had an altogether different idea when it came to making money out of the internet. To bring in the millions of souls looking for the better half together..all for free. And most of his revenues come from adsense. He runs it with his wife from his home. And what he makes? A cool $300,000 per month. And he manages to serve 20 million dynamic page views a day on plentyoffish using a single web server and 1 database server. This guy not only knows how to make money by bringing people together but he knows his computers too. He talks about it in his blog.
The owners of the hotornot.com site makes $15,000 a day! I mean a picture rating site making that much money is awesome. Talk about building popularity. All they had to do was drive it by the internet readers who provided all their resources..the pics and the rating. They thought about it and the idea stuck. Wait! the list is not over. Netguru's Matther Daimler is another person that I really appreciate for turning his simple idea of giving the flyers a smooth journey into a website that earns him $10,000 to $20,000 a month. And that is just the money he earns through adsense.
When Matther Daimler, 28, used to be just a traveler he used to look at the better situated traveler and think "He has more legroom. I want that seat next time." From there it just turned into an obsession to find a better seat and to a website where he started to rope in like minded travelers who can get an idea about what seat positions are available and get it through his website. He has now 21 airlines in his website and it has become the gathering place for all those long legged and comfy addicted travelers. His site is now not only about getting the best seat but also about getting the best amenities.
And by owning blogs Jason makes more than a million dollar a year just through adsense. He owns the weblogsinc.com site. You can read an interview with Jason here which would give you some insight into how he went with it.
I mean these are people whose ideas have metamorphosized into million dollar bank accounts and when you think about that you can't stop to think about the guys behind youtube.com Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, whose idea of having a place for people to upload and share their videos with a change using flash players online lead to a $1.5 billion purchase by google and when you realise that the site started operating only in feb 2005 and google bought it for that amount when the site was just over a year old it is just amazing. And how can one forget Tom Anderson who founded myspace.com. An idea of having a social networking site resulting in a purchase for $580 million by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation in July 2005. It is amazing to think that the original myspace.com domain was owned by some other company that provided online storage and file sharing for customers but collapsed due to the slow speed and lack of revenue.
On the other spectrum of the internet there are a group of people making a life through their creativeness and passion to write. Yes blogging is yet another aspect and I will be touching on that in the coming days.
By the way if you need more info on adsense and the related stuffs and how you can wisely use it to bring in some money i suggest you go to Darren't Rowse's blog site problogger where he generously gives you a lot of tips.
There are other bloggers too whom I find useful and I will be talking about them in a later article.
Most of the great marketeers and businessman are made on the streets not on the business schools. But yes if you have the talent the business schools can horn it. But it is the innate passion that distinguishes people. So follow your passion. It's all about the unique creative ideas, passion and executing it well.
